The ritual that could change your family

Our kids aren’t the mad foodies some people tend to assume they will be. They think garlic is spicy some days. They can spot a lettuce leaf in a sandwich from across the room. And demand it be removed.

We have the same challenges I’m sure most parents have when it comes to taking young children to eat new food. You just never know what you’re going to get with these guys. Some days they will try anything; other days they’ll just take a cheese pizza thank you and please don’t even attempt to try anything else.

So I had no idea how things would go last Friday night when we all piled in the car and drove an hour and 20 minutes down the highway to Burwood, in Sydney’s western suburbs. We were facing a total of three hours’ driving for what could be a total bust.

But here’s our rationale. Our children don’t get enough culture. They live on a nice suburban street and they go to a friendly school, but they’re not exposed regularly to different ideas, different ways of living, or even different flavours.

So my partner Jess and I are going to take them on an excursion once a month, to get their hit of culture. Sydney (and while we’re at it, Melbourne too) is full of enclaves that can transport you to a different country for a few hours, whether that’s Eastwood or Burwood, Merrylands or Blacktown, Harris Park or Haymarket.

We might not be able to afford to take the kids on many big overseas trips right now, but we can afford to fill the car with fuel (no small feat) and take them somewhere interesting on a Friday night. And so, Friday Night Food Adventures was born.

This was actually inspired by something my friends and I used to do way back before any of us had kids.

It started when the 2006 FIFA World Cup was being played in Germany. My group of friends decided that, to make World Cup viewing more exciting from the other side of the world, we would try to watch the games and eat some good food in a part of Sydney that was traditionally home to the diaspora of whichever nation was playing. We called it the World Cup of Eating.

We watched Germany play from the Concordia Club in Tempe. We spent the night in Petersham when Portugal played. We headed out to Eastwood for a South Korea game.

We had so much fun that when the World Cup finished we didn’t want it to end, so we invented the Alphabet of Eating, in which we would eat the food of a country or region starting with every letter of the alphabet, preferably in a part of Sydney where people from that country tend to live.

So I have this in the back of my mind as a good thing to do, even though we never did get all the way through the alphabet – we got stuck on Y, and were hoping to go to a Yemeni restaurant, but just couldn’t find one at the time. Then we all went and had kids.

Thus, Friday Night Food Adventures makes sense: let’s take that same idea and drag our under-cultured children along with us. Let’s force them to see parts of Sydney they didn’t know existed, and eat some interesting food and learn a few things about a new culture along the way.

Burwood seemed a natural first stop, given it’s famous for its Chinatown night markets, which are the perfect place to plonk your kids down and go grab a heap of different foods from various vendors and not worry much about how everyone is behaving.

This is low-risk dining: there’s no one around to be offended if anything doesn’t get eaten. There’s also a playground at the markets, and a place selling beer. Tell me that doesn’t make sense.

We actually kicked things off outside the market, at a restaurant called Cheng’s Xi’an Traditional Foods, to try a few dishes you’re not likely to find at the market. The kids enjoyed the Xianese flatbreads filled with pork, and monstered the pork and celery dumplings like there was a famine coming, but the hand-pulled spinach noodles had a dusting of chilli powder on them, and didn’t pass the test. Whatever.

We then wandered into the market proper, which is all neon lights and clanging pans, with vendors selling everything from xiao long bao dumplings to Peking duck pancakes to fried rice and noodles to those weird tornado potato things on sticks.

There’s a real buzz to the night markets, people everywhere, the smell of smoke, of spices, of good things being created and eaten. It’s not exactly the streets of Shanghai, but it’s as close as we’re likely to get without an international flight, and the kids lapped up every bit of it, the bustle, the lights, the choices of all that food.

Xiao long bao: massive hit. Duck pancakes: surefire winner. None of these are exactly pushing the envelope. They also had Chinese sausages on sticks because hey, we’re just pleasing the crowd at this point. And then yum cha-style mango pancakes to finish.

This is kind of a soft opening to Friday Night Food Adventures, with recognisable dishes served in low-risk surrounds. We’ll push things a little further next month.

As a concept though, as a way to take your kids out to do something fun while not spending a whole lot of money and introducing them to the wonders of the world in your own backyard, it’s a surefire winner.

Our kids aren’t mad foodies. But we will get them there.

WHAT WE’VE BEEN EATING LATELY

This isn’t so much what we’ve been eating, but how we’ve been cooking it. I bought Jess a donabe – a traditional clay cooking vessel from Japan, used for cooking rice in particular – six months ago or more. We’ve never used it, because it doesn’t work on an induction cooktop, and we already have a rice cooker that does the job just fine. It’s just been sitting there looking pretty.

This week, however, we dragged out the portable gas burner and gave the donabe a try, first soaking Japanese koshihikari rice for 20 minutes, then cooking it for 15 minutes, then resting it for another 20. Sounds like a bit of a faff, I know.

And the result? Honestly, spectacular. The best rice I have ever eaten, at least at home. Perfectly cooked grains, all separate and yet lightly clinging to each other. Beautiful flavour and texture. Well worth the effort.

Which is unfortunate really, because it’s much more labour-intensive than the press-and-forget rice cooker. Maybe it would have been better to never know?

WHAT I’VE BEEN LOVING THIS WEEK

• Despite all the furore over Melbourne Airport’s decision to shift its pick-up zone away from the main terminals, I arrived there this week and picked up an Uber from right out the front of T2 with no issues. So I guess if you’re paying for a ride, nothing has changed?
• Speaking of Melbourne, I’m here to sample its old-school restaurants, its institutions, and to me this is what makes the city great. See you at Flower Drum.

WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN LOVING

• Fiji has introduced a new tourist levy, the Tourism Services Tax, whacking an extra 5 per cent on top of any payments to tourism businesses with an annual turnover of $A1.3 million or more. Holidays booked before 1 September this year will be exempt from the tax.
• Is England losing its pub culture? Recent signs are pointing to yes.